Looking up at the night sky recently and thinking, “Wow, there are more lights than I remember,” you’re not alone. With Amazon launching 27 satellites this week for its Kuiper constellation, joining SpaceX’s Starlink fleet, Earth’s orbit is getting crowded—and fast. Over 14,000 satellites circle the planet right now, and thousands more are on the way.
It’s good news for remote internet users, but there’s a dark side: catastrophic collisions. It only takes a tiny piece of debris to trigger—known as Kessler Syndrome—creating more debris, more collisions, and potentially making entire orbits unusable. Who manages all this traffic, you ask? Essentially no one. Experts are raising alarms, but there’s no oversight, so the next space disaster could be around the corner—literally.
